by S. G. Night
Racath’s head was swimming with dozens of new questions. “…Help me do what, exactly?”
“You’re going to be important, Racath,” she told him. “The most important person of this Age. You’re going to bring down the Demons. And I’m supposed to help you do it.”
Racath shook his head, looking into the fire. His head was starting to hurt. “That doesn’t seem likely…the Genshwin have been fighting the Demons since they got here. We haven’t changed anything. What makes me so special? Why me?”
Nelle shrugged. “Why not you? It has to be somebody, right?”
“So what is that supposed to mean for me?” Racath asked. He wasn’t sure if he was playing along because he believed her, or because he was just too incredulous to argue.
“The life you knew as a Genshwin is going to change soon,” Nelle answered. There was a note of finality in her words, like she was daring the universe to challenge her. “You’ve heard of the Scorpions, right?”
Racath frowned, puzzled. His throat felt as dry as the sticks in the fire. “The Genshwin elite? Yeah, sure…they’re a myth.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Nelle said. “The Scorpions are very real. When I said earlier that I’m indirectly connected to the Genshwin? What I meant was that my friend, a Majiski named Oron, trains and mentors the Scorpions — a specialized group of Genshwin operating outside Velik Tor. Mrak thinks that they’re his personal minions, but behind closed doors, Oron’s not fond of the Patriarch’s agenda. His ideas are more like yours: openly challenging the Demons.”
“Great, fine, the Scorpions are real,” Racath muttered as he rubbed at his forehead. “What does that have to do with me?”
“There are two Scorpions as of right now,” Nelle explained. “Traditionally, there should be three. Mrak is going to send you to train with Oron soon. You will be the next Scorpion — the leader of the Scorpions — and that’s where you’re going to have your chance to really change things.”
Racath squeezed the bridge of his nose and pinched his eyes shut. It felt like the inside of his head was filled with sloshing water. “This is a lot to take in. I’m not even sure I believe it.”
“That’s fine,” Nelle said consolingly. She stood and patted his shoulder. “I thought you’d need some time to process all of this. That’s why I wanted to talk to you tonight, before things started picking up.”
“Much appreciated,” Racath mumbled, resting his face in his hand.
“Look, you don’t have to believe me,” Nelle told him. “Hell, you can even try and resist fate if you want. But God has a plan for you, Racath Thanjel. Fate has a plan for you. Sooner or later your own choices will bring you into that plan.”
“Good to know,” Racath said through his fingers.
There was a soft rustle, and a shallow silence. When Racath looked up, the girl with golden hair was gone.
Racath spent the rest of the night beneath the outcropping, alone with nothing but the fire and his confusion for company.
***
FIVE
Dark Corners
His face blank and grey as the sky outside, Notak flicked his wrist in a constant circle. The weapon in his hand — a gift from Oron, an ancient lanac axe, whose head could be unlocked and dangled like a flail from a chain stored inside the haft — circled his hand in a graceful orbit. The chain was a blurry wheel of glinting silver, spinning in front of his eyes.
Sitting on the living room floor of the safe house (one of many Genshwin outposts scattered throughout Io, places they called Manji Tor’s) Rachel sifted through scattered mess of yellowing parchment. Her face contorted with mounting frustration as she violently discarded paper after paper, a soft trickle of obscenities dripping from her twitching lips. Her cursing gradually escalated in volume and intensity, like water flowing out of a dirty pump.
“Piss…piss, piss, piss, bloody piss! C’mon, dammit…wait…ugh, are you fauling kidding me? Dammit, fauling…bloody…pissing…faul! Faul faul faul faul!!!”
She was screaming by that point. Notak raised an impassive eyebrow at her.
“What ill devil tormenteth thee so as to engender such boorish language?”
Rachel eyes cracked upward like a leather whip, her eyebrows grinding together. “Don’t you dare quote Basti at me,” she snapped. “Especially not Passion’s Fall! You know how much I hate that book! I still don’t understand why Oron made me read it.”
“He did it to culture you, Rachel,” Notak said perfunctorily. “To educate you about what life was like before the Wall went up. Basti was the crown jewel of the literary era before the Dominion started burning books. And there is no harm in a little classical romance.”
“There is when the girl gets herself killed trying to save her stupid lover from dying for her,” Rachel retorted. “Particularly when their relationship was stupid to begin with.”
“Do not try and argue the quality of literature to me,” Notak said, inflectionless. “You will lose. And regardless, I rather liked the characters in Passion’s Fall. They seemed quite believable to me.”
“Well, if your emotional capacity fits snuggly inside an inkwell, then sure they are,” Rachel sniped.
A frown cracked Notak’s flat expression, like a chisel driven into stone. A slight stinging sensation prickled inside his chest. “I have some emotional capacity…” he said, so softly that the clink of the lanac’s chain almost drowned it out. So quietly it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself.
That brought Rachel up short. Getting any sort of response out of Notak was hard enough. She could count one hand the times she had ever seen him actually hurt by something. It was like seeing a mountain cry. Something you really didn’t want to see. A guilty flush climbed her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “That was uncalled for….” She shrugged stiffly, shuffling through the papers again, just for an excuse to look away from those Elven eyes. “I’m just…a little irked right now….”
“It is nothing to worry about,” Notak answered quietly. “What is troubling you?”
“Just these fauling records!” Rachel groaned enthusiastically, eager to move away from her blunder. She grabbed a fistful of papers and waved them about in demonstration.
“What about them?” Notak asked.
“Whoever wrote them had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. It’s all a bunch of contradictions and I can’t — would you put the fauling axe down!? Honestly, you’re going to cut something off one day, and I’m gonna laugh at you — Anyway, I can’t find a single reference to anyone by the name of Hammon in this mess! The only records we’ve got on Westward Trade at all are from twenty years ago!”
She threw up her hands and paper whirled around her head in an angry cyclone.
Wordlessly, Notak drew the chain back into the axe’s haft, locked the head in place, and slipped it onto his belt. He crossed the floor of the living room, bending to examine the muddled disaster of papers. The notes were all that the Manji Tor’s tiny archive had to offer regarding the nuances of Dírorth; together, the papers made a hodge-podge carpet of yellowed parchment, slopped with cluttered writing in the hand of some unknown Genshwin who had nothing better to do than chronicle the history of the city’s septic system.
Craning his head to get a better look at the paper Rachel was holding, Notak squinted at the atrocious swirls of scribbles.
“I see the problem,” he said. “They misspelled hydrodynamics, for one thing.”
Rachel threw down the parchment, scattering the heap of records into another confused storm. “There’s nothing worthwhile here. Nothing except that the last Dominion census estimated a population of almost seven hundred thousand Humans in this city. Seven hundred thousand people for us to sort through.”
“Well, you know what that means,” Notak said. Impulsively, he began to gather the scattered papers into an orderly pile.
Rachel grimaced as he worked. “But I don’t like talking to people…
.”
“Do not be ridiculous, you love talking to people,” Notak said, gently replacing the notes into the binding from whence they had sprung and burying them deep within the gaping maw of their respective shelf. “I have seen that evil glint you get in your eye when you make people stammer.”
A mildly mischievous grin found Rachel’s face. “Well, maybe a little bit....”
Notak laughed genuinely and Rachel’s smile grew. Sometimes she honestly couldn’t imagine life without the Elf.
“Come on,” he urged with a tap on Rachel’s shoulder. “We should change into something less conspicuous.”
They took turns dressing in the other room, selecting clothes from the Tor’s wardrobe to replace their Shadows — eye-catching as they were, bristling with half a dozen illegal weapons. Notak averted his eyes to allow Rachel the privacy to change.
Meanwhile, he used a small mirror to examine himself. Slate grey skin, tapered ears, feline eyes — they would all draw far too much attention. And so, like always, he fed a pulse of magic out through his flesh, tingling as it coursed over his entire body. In the mirror’s reflection, he began to change. Grey skin became white. Pointed ears rounded. Angular facial structure shifted. And soon the man in the mirror looked almost Human, neat platinum hair adorning his regal face. The eyes were the same ovoid shape as before, however; just like a mask, Notak’s illusions could not cover them without obscuring his vision.
Notak glared at the illusionary man in the mirror. Those cat-like sapphire eyes stared back at him. He hated them, hated the skin and ears beneath the mask, too. They were the marks of his race. The marks of Elves who had allowed themselves to be ejected without a fight. Elves who had watched happily from exile while the Majiski died and the Humans suffered. The marks of cowards. He allowed himself to scowl while Rachel wasn’t looking.
Notak discarded the mirror and turned back to Rachel as she slipped on her tunic. Brushing her hair back into place with her fingers, Rachel jerked her chin at Notak’s illusionary face.
“Nice. Your turn.”
A questioning eyebrow arched on Notak’s face. “You’re wearing that?” he asked, half teasing, half serious.
“What?” Rachel said innocently, looking down at her outfit of heavy boots, trousers, and a forest green tunic. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Rather boyish, don’t you think?”
“Oh, come on,” Rachel said in exasperation. “You can’t expect me to go traipsing through the streets in a dress.”
“Society might,” Notak quipped.
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Oh yes, because propriety has been such a focal point for the Dominion’s platform.” She performed an exaggerated curtsy that bled with sarcasm.
“Point,” Notak conceded. “Just try not to assert yourself too much. I hear some strange gossip following women dressed like boys.” He winked at her.
She scowled in return, but it was a friendly kind of scowl. “Go get dressed, you dirty Elf.”
Chuckling softly, Notak dressed himself in a similar fashion: a simple but elegant black tunic and matching pants. He kept his Stinger gauntlets on. With the blade hidden within the gauntlet, additionally hidden by most of his sleeves, they could easily pass as innocent leather gloves.
Once Rachel had fixed her hair in the mirror, they left the Manji Tor together, slipping out the door into the dark alley outside. After securing the bolts on the heavy iron door, the Scorpions slipped out of the alley and into the bustling labyrinth of Dírorth.
——
Unlike the rain-slicked streets of Oblakgrad, Dírorth was a stir of activity. The streets were lined with vendors selling greasy meat pies to passersby. The clogging crowd of Humans cramped together as they pushed past one another, rushing from one errand to the next. The shouting of a thousand voices melted together into a perpetual buzz, like a great swarm of bees hovering over the street.
And yet a strange silence hung over the city. It filled in the background, inhabiting dark corners where the din of the crowd could not squelch it. It had a strange omnipresence, like something that you are subconsciously aware of, but do not consciously see with your eyes.
It was a silence ignored, hidden by the façade of hectic traffic. You wouldn’t really notice it, not unless you were looking for it. Not unless you actually stopped to listen.
If the city folk had stopped, frozen, if they had stilled themselves for a moment, the silence would have gaped wide open like a dark, hungry maw. But they ignored it. For the past century, they had covered that silence with the commotion of everyday life, refusing to let it control them. To define them. They did not hear it. They would not hear it.
I myself did not hear it for years and years, not until the day that I actually stopped to listen.
Can you hear it, now? Can you hear it in the words your reading, the words I say to you? Listen. Hear its empty resonance across the cobbles. Feel it in the dust beneath Notak’s boot, damp with last night’s rain. Smell it on the ragged clothes of the peasants, hidden in the folds of dirty fabric. See it in their eyes, latent beneath the gloss of the everyday. Taste it in the clamor of the streets, clamor born out of a unconscious urge to fill the quiet with something, anything to drive it away, anything to stave off the silence that reeked with defeat.
It was the echo of a hundred years of slavery. It was the song of a people, waiting for God.
——
“So where are we planning to start?” Rachel asked, struggling to stay at Notak’s side as they weaved in and out of the crowd.
“We will cover more ground by splitting up,” Notak remarked. “I will take the upper city. Westward Trade has a reputation among the richer merchants. Surely they can point us to Hammon.”
“Well, then. I guess I’ll make my way over towards Redborough and the houses of ill repute.” Rachel grinned impishly.
Notak did not take his eyes off the street, but a grin found his face. “The brothels? If you are looking for new employment, then you definitely should not have dressed like that.”
She gave him a shove. “Faul you! You know what I meant. Sleazy rich people like Hammon are the reason whores were invented.”
“And if he has a wife for that?”
Rachel shot him a patronizing smile. “Oh, sweetie, you’re so naïve. They all have wives. But that doesn’t mean they’re getting any.”
Notak shrugged. “You are the expert, I suppose. Be on your way, then. Meet me back at the Manji Tor at sundown?”
Squinting, Rachel looked up at the blanket of thick clouds that covered the sky. “And how am I supposed to know when the sun is setting?”
“When it starts getting dark,” Notak answered flatly.
She laughed at him, then broke away, melting into the restless crowd.
Now alone, Notak started towards the wealthier piece of the city. He wove his way through the thick throngs and twisting avenues, his pace even and graceful, until the streets started to become less dusty and the buildings less dilapidated.
Soon enough he stood outside the high walls of Patrician’s Market square. Ancient columns towered over the street, making a graceful, arched entrance to the walled-in bazaar.
Two Arkûl in black armor flanked the entrance. They held their wicked halberds crossed between them, barring the way against any lesser folk who couldn’t afford the access tax. A large brass bowl sat on a pedestal against the wall, filled with the tolls paid by the exclusive market’s patrons. They greeted Notak with disparaging glowers that contorted their ugly red-black faces into knots, forests of yellowing fangs twisting out behind their lips.
Notak approached, settling into character as he strutted toward the archway. One Arkûl spoke in a deep, grumbling rasp:
“The charge is one solid and five to—”
Notak knew the tax. Without breaking stride, he tossed a single obul and five dyre at the Arkûl. “Catch.”
Caught by surprise, the guards snatched at the flying silver coins. They fumbled, cur
sing as they dropped both the money and their weapons. Both guards fell to their iron-armored knees, scrambling after the elusive coins. Notak strode past them under the arch. Threat neutralized. Pausing only to pilfer an obul and a handful of dyre out of the collection bowl while the guards were busy, he entered Patrician’s Market.
Notak had never seen so much wealth in one place before. The square was significantly cleaner than the rest of the city. No filth caked the street. The air tasted fresh. No wonder they had such obscene entry tolls.
Trade kiosks lined the perimeter of the wall, colorful canopies shading their full displays. Plump, finely dressed merchants sat behind their stall counters, bickering back and forth with plump, finely dressed customers. Performers in kitschy costumes drew small crowds of half-interested patrons with their flashy routines. Throngs of market-goers congregated in a central rectangular area filled with tables, bordered by the carts of street-cooks selling steaming bowls of gourmet delights. And through it all was the pervasive sound of money. Money lost. Money found. Spent. Earned. Exchanged. Gambled. Wasted. Tainted lucre, wealth corrupted by those who found success on the suffering of others.
They were leeches, all of them. Notak could respect a man who rose to wealth on the fuel of his own sweat. But these people had never worked for anything. Their prosperity came from latching onto the Dominion’s coattails, or sucking out the blood out of those beneath them. These people were the Demons' ilk. They were no different than the Arkûl that constrained them, or the Goblins that terrorized them. And if, one day, the Dominion fell, they would face the same punishment as their Demon masters.
But today was not that day, and Notak was not their judge, their jury, nor their executioner. Today, he was just looking for answers. And so he entered the multitude of noblemen and traders, his sharp ears eavesdropping on a dozen different conversations as he weaved through the crowd.